[ Reprinted from Science, N. S., Vol. XLVII, No. 1211 , Pages 2^9-251/., March 15 , 1918']

DR. FRANKLIN P. MALL: AN APPRECIATION

The death of Doctor Mall is so recent
and my grief for his loss so fresh that I
find myself reflecting on the fruitful and
delightful memories of our past association
instead of writing out my impressions of
his unusual personality.

Doctor Mall came to Johns Hopkins in
the late summer of 1893 and just before
the medical school opened its doors to the
first class of students in the autumn. It
was there that we met. I recall vividly my
excitement and nervousness when the
rumor was circulated about the old patho¬
logical building that Mall had arrived.
His name had been a tradition among the
small group in the department of pathology.
A few years earlier, before the hospital had
been opened to patients, he had come to
the laboratory and as fellow in pathology
had performed a miracle of interesting and
important studies on the connective tissue
foundations of the organs. Fellows in
pathology there had been since his time,
but no one whose memory was glorified
as Mall’s 'had been. We had so often
heard him and his work spoken of by
Doctor Welch, Doctor Halsted, and others,
including the indispensable Schultz, who
was for many years presiding genius over
the technical and janitorial services of the
laboratories and whose commendation car¬
ried with us such great weight, that I
pictured Mall as quite different from what
in actual life he proved to be.

One’s fancy — my fancy surely was so —

when young is apt to produce its own pic¬
tures. In my fanciful portrait of Mall I
represented. him as large, absorbed, and
rather austere. Never was a fancy more
completely and happily shattered. I can
just remember our meeting ; those who knew
Mall well will never forget how engagingly
he smiled. It was with one of the best of
his smiles that he greeted me.

That event was the auspicious beginning
of a warm friendship which never wavered
until his death. During the first period
of half a dozen years we were in almost
daily contact. Later, and after 1900,
when I left the medical school to enter the
University of Pennsylvania, our meetings
were at first not infrequent. I shall never
cease to regret the increasing intervals be¬
tween them which followed my removal to
the Rockefeller Institute in New York.
Increasing responsibilities and enlarging
duties play havoc with one’s life, and I
feel that I suffered a grievous and now
irremediable loss in permitting those cir¬
cumstances to cut me off to the extent it
seemed inevitable they should from asso¬
ciation with Mall. To a certain extent,
letters took the place of personal contact.
Thus I kept more or less in touch with the
workings of his restless and constructive
mind.

It probably will strike few except his
very intimate friends that Mall was by
temperament a reformer. He was an un¬
compromising democrat and hence enter-

2

SCIENCE

tained the firmest belief in liberty in its
true and proper sense. Out of this in¬
tensity of conviction arose the views ex¬
pressed in conversation more frequently
but not more forcibly than in his addresses,
on full opportunity and freedom in uni¬
versity education, both in its pre-graduate
and post-graduate aspects. His compre¬
hending and incisive mind was the first, I
believe, to appreciate and afterwards to
propound that the best of medical edu¬
cational institutions were half-hearted
affairs. That part of the institutions which
a quarter of a century earlier had been
the weakest — the laboratory branches
namely — had been immeasurably strength¬
ened in that short period, during which the
previously stronger part — namely the
clinical branches — had progressed rela¬
tively little. The balance could be struck
and must be, even though in the process
the old system were, if need be, completely
shattered, as much shattered indeed as had
been the earlier hybrid combined laboratory
and clinical chairs. Out of this conception
which Mall propounded, I am almost in¬
clined to say preached to us persistently,
arose the present movement, ever gaining
force and strength until it has now become
almost irresistible in favor of full-time
clinical professorships.

It is very interesting to consider just
here the extent to which he used others,
converts or disciples as they may be called,
to diffuse more broadly his reforming
ideas. One would search Mall’s miscel¬
laneous papers, of which indeed there are
notably few, in vain for an exhaustive
presentation of the case for the full-time
clinical plan. The wide dissemination of
the idea by the printed page was left to
others, while he maintained the high leve]
of conviction in those coming under his
immediate influence by an irresistible fund
of logical exposition.

In his delightful essay on his master.

Wilhelm His, Mall reveals his attitude
toward higher education in its various
complex aspects. I wonder how many re¬
turned foreign students have kept up an
intimate correspondence with a revered
teacher extending over a long period of
time, like that disclosed by Mall in this
essay. The extracts from his letters there
published show how well the older man
comprehended the younger, as the spirit
and substance of the essay shows how
the younger man admired and appreciated
the older. There is no doubt that His per¬
ceived in Mall rare personal and mental
qualities, as he confides to him not only
the subjects and trend of work, but his
larger aspiration in the wide domain of
anatomical research. In the light of the
relation there revealed one can surmise
the satisfaction and joy with which His,
had he lived, would have welcomed the
establishment of the Institute of Embry¬
ology with Mall as the first director.

In my task of presenting a fragment of
the personality of Mall as apparent to his
intimate friends and associates, I find my¬
self embarrassed by the many memories
that crowd my mind. It is not easy to
select episodes. I love myself to think of
the period during which he lived, as did
the medical officers, in the Johns Hopkins
Hospital, for then we were almost con¬
stantly together. The small, older group
of men — older, that is, than the internes. —
saw much of one another. Mall, Frank
Smith, Thayer, Barker, and I met always
at dinner, frequently at breakfast and
luncheon, at the small table at the head of
the room. There was lively conversation
and much variety of theme; and not a
little good cheer. A small photographic
print still exists which pictures the group ;
it is chiefly notable for the good likeness
of Mall which it presents, showing him
as it does in one of his happiest moods.

Mall returned to Baltimore as the first

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3

professor of anatomy of the new medical
school. The physical conditions surround¬
ing the launching of the medical school
were so simple as to he almost austere.
Aside from the hospital — a model of com¬
pleteness at the time — the plan for housing
the new departments of the school we should
now regard as meager in the extreme. I
sometimes think that it may he well to
recall from time to time the simple begin¬
nings out of which the great institution
of the Johns Hopkins Medical School arose.
The only additions made to the hospital
buildings to accommodate the departments
of anatomy, physiology, and physiological
chemistry and pharmacology, were two
stories added to the original small patho¬
logical building erected as a mortuary for
the hospital and already housing the entire
pathological department. It was in the
upper, or fourth story, of that enlarged
building that the complex department of
anatomy took origin.

Some one else, who traces the growth of
anatomy at the medical school, can tell
better than I can how Mall adapted the
limited space and facilities at his command
to the teaching of anatomy, histology, and
embryology, and to the conduct of re¬
search. There was no actual break in
the continuity of his own investigations,
and very soon after the medical classes were
taken in he began to produce the new work
which in a steady and increasing stream
has come out of the anatomical depart¬
ment.

There were not a few obstacles to be
overcome in getting the students’ work
properly started. I recall the shifts he
was obliged to make to bridge over the
gaps in dissecting until human cadavers
became available. This period was for
Mall, in many ways, an anxious one. But
it was not long before this particular ob¬
stacle was overcome, and because of the
improvements which he introduced in the

preservation of human cadavers, his lab¬
oratory soon became the custodian of all
the anatomical material employed for dis¬
section and surgical instruction through¬
out the city.

The kind of teaching which Mall gave
to his students has been described; there
was no lecturing in his curriculum. He
had almost a horror of lectures in anatomy ;
the idea collided with his fundamental
conception of how such a practical sub¬
ject is to be acquired. In his views there
was one road only to that goal. The stu¬
dent must teach himself in order to learn.
Hence there were provided the objects to
be dissected, text-books, atlases, models,
and time, with a sufficiency but no excess
of instructors or guides. He saw no virtue
in exhibiting and describing a predis¬
sected part, provided the students were
given opportunity to dissect for themselves.
That this principle is sound no one will,
I think, now deny. That its operation
has produced a remarkably large number
of superior, independent, and broad ana¬
tomists, the history of his department
amply shows.

But a confusion of method and man is
often made with disastrous consequences.
It is easy to imagine this mode of teach¬
ing anatomy adopted widely without yield¬
ing the results which Mall obtained. To
put the method into effect would doubtless
represent a great advance over the old sys¬
tem, but without a strong, able teacher
and guide, such as Mall was, the phe¬
nomenal results which he achieved would
not be attained. In other words, he was
a sound innovator because he was a strong
man. He was a successful leader in anat¬
omy because he was learned and original.
He has left a rich heritage to science
through his own labors and those of his
pupils, because to all his other qualities
he added the rare ones of wisdom, kind¬
ness and generosity.

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SCIENCE

Our proximity in the pathological build¬
ing brought us into frequent association.
In the early days of the medical school,
Mall often attended the autopsies, many
of which I performed. His active interest
in the pathological phenomena continued
throughout his life, in part possibly as the
result of the year spent as fellow in pathol¬
ogy under Doctor Welch. But in fact he
did not disassociate, as is often erroneously
done, facts of pathology from those of
anatomy. Being naturally inquisitive in
regard to the relation of cause and effect
in respect to the unit forms of organs, he
was also prone to inquire into the effects
of causes in their nature pathological.

At about the period when Mall was
studying the lobular unit of the liver I
was induced to attempt the application of
some of the methods he worked out to
cirrhosis of that organ — a mere illustration
of the way in which two related depart¬
ments through him were made to react on
each other.

I imagine that few who knew Mall even
quite well realize with what intensity of
absorption and application he would work
at a problem once he had gripped it, as
one might say. In temperament he was
naturally reflective. Hence there occurred
periods during which he appeared to be
doing little in his laboratory. At such
times he would become possessed with the
impulse to roam about the building or out
into the city or into the adjacent country.
It was remarkable that when under the in¬
fluence of those moods he did not seek
solitude so much as another form of
activity. I was not infrequently taken
away by him for a stroll through East
Baltimore, and on these expeditions I ac¬
quired quite a knowledge of that part of
the city. They were in many ways ex¬
tremely interesting occasions, for during
them he often talked his best and sketched

advanced ideas on educational and other
reforms, as well as on problems of research.
I think Mall never dreamt idly. He was
possessed of a romantic imagination, but it
was both controlled and constructive. To
not a few who did not understand him well
his ideas sometimes sounded extreme, but
they invariably rested on real foundations,
as is now evident since so many of them
have been carried into practical affairs.

At other times he worked out problems
in his laboratory with consuming intensity.
It would seem as if while under what I
have called the spell of his reflective mood,
a problem would formulate itself more
definitely, or some barring obstacle give
way to a revealed point of view. However
that may be, my notion was that the
periods of reflection were signs that he
would attack a new or solve an old prob¬
lem; and I always looked for new ideas
and accomplishments when the mood
changed.

If I have at all succeeded in revealing
Doctor Mall as he appeared to me, then I
have presented to you a complex person¬
ality. The remarkable thing is the way in
which all the pronounced qualities that
characterized him were fused into a simple,
harmonious, kind and lovable individual¬
ity. I have referred already to Mall’s
democratic spirit. He was an intense lover
and active exponent of liberty. His belief
and confidence in freedom extended far
beyond the confines of the university and
laboratory, and into the world of politics
and government. Freedom within the uni¬
versity he held as the first condition of the
successful struggle of the forces of light
over superstition and darkness. Within
the walls of his laboratory the fullest
liberty prevailed. Once outside the realm
of the prescribed task for training, each
man followed the bent of his own talents
and tastes. However, his principles as
well as his practise sharply differentiated

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6

between liberty and license; hence the rise
under him of! a group of strong, independ¬
ent, but sound teachers and investigators.
Mall would probably have combated the
suggestion that he produced a school of
anatomists, using the term in its usual
significance. He would probably have in¬
sisted that he merely continued in Amer¬
ica the system which he pursued or saw in
force in Switzerland and Germany. But
I believe rather that he made such definite
contributions to the higher education and
training of anatomists, and produced in,
alas! a few brief years so large a number
of varied and capable teachers and investi¬
gators, as to mark a new era in the his¬
tory of higher educational endeavor.

I said that his deep convictions of free¬
dom carried him into the wider domain of
social liberty. Mall never propagandized
on this subject. He however felt intensely
about it. It is noteworthy that with all
the admiration for the freedom of migra¬
tion from university to university and the
wide election of subjects and ideas in the
German university, to the social and polit¬
ical conditions of that country he was anti¬
pathetic. To so strong a “ democrat/ ’ to
use that term in its wider and better sig¬
nificance, a studied paternalism and im¬
perialistic tendency were deeply unsym¬
pathetic.

Mall’s sincerity, self-effacement, and
never-failing consideration were at the root
of his noble qualities and made companion¬

ship with him a rare privilege. I have
already spoken of my own good fortune
in possessing in some degree his intimate
friendship. It is a rare possession indeed
and one to be cherished. But I owe him
also an educational impress, none the less
valuable because of its subtle nature. I
am of the opinion that his pupils were in¬
fluenced by this unusual quality which be¬
cause of its elusiveness seems an emana¬
tion — so little was it given off or received
with immediate conscious perception.

Mall was absorbed in ideas. They
formed the substance of his serious talk,
but he was by no means a stranger to the
lighter side of human relations, for he
possessed a gentle and engaging humor
which might even, when provoked, become
a little biting. It took time and some skill
to penetrate an outer film of reserve which
arose from innate modesty and shyness,
but once beneath that protective covering,
one readily discovered in him a simple,
idealistic and gifted person of many sides,
possessed of an almost miraculous power
to stimulate students to put forth their
best efforts. His memory and example
will long survive in the achievements of
his students and associates, in the broad
ideas which he disseminated, and in the
admiration and affection which he inspired.

Simon Flexner

The Rockefeller Institute
for Medical Research

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